Apparently, some people think the new Office “12” (aka Office 2007) interface is not very “simple”. Let’s just quickly compare Office “12” with Office “11” then, shall we?
Here’s the “new mail” window in Office “11”:
I can count no less than 52 toolbar buttons on this window (not including the menus). Though they’re not all visible here, since I reduced the width of the window to fit on the screen a bit better.
And here’s the same window in Office “12”:
I count 38 buttons here (including the menus). You do the math as to which one is “simpler.” Now, I realize that you can customize your Outlook “11” toolbar to suite (i.e. you could remove all but the essential buttons if you like), but I’m sure there’s no reason why you couldn’t do the same with the Outlook “12” ribbon as well. All I’m saying is that the default interface has much fewer buttons than previous versions.
Also of note is that the default interface may actually have more buttons that what is displayed (this looks to be the case, actually, as evidenced by the right-most ribbon thingy being cut off a bit), but maybe the original author of the screen shot had to do the same as me: reduce the width of the window. So like I said in my last post, I’m going to reserve judgment until the final release.